BINGHAMTON, NY – (WIVT/WBGH) On the eve of the annual Walk to Defeat ALS, an effort is underway to bring modern innovation to find ways to better diagnose, treat and ultimately cure the fatal disease.

Indu Navar is founder and CEO of EverythingALS.

She and her husband Peter Cohen were tech entrepreneurs in California until he died of ALS four years ago. Frustrated that it took two years until his symptoms worsened for him to be clinically diagnosed, Navar set out to use a Silicon Valley approach to the disease.

She wants to use biological markers to help establish a diagnosis before a patient develops symptoms of the disease. This will help to enroll people in clinical trials and get them started on medications to slow the disease sooner.

“We have cloud, we have compute, we have storage, we have technology, we can actually look at a massive amount of data. And we can look at what’s going on in a tiny cell. I think the time is right now. I really believe that if we can all come together, collect that massive amount of data, there will be answers,” said Navar.

Navar hopes to use an open-source approach by collecting data from people with ALS who log onto everythingals.org.

The Walk to Defeat ALS takes place tomorrow at Otsiningo Park. Registration begins at 9:30 a.m. and the walk starts at 11.

For more information or to register online, find a link at binghamtonhomepage.com